Norseman Raider (The Norseman Chronicles Book 4) (19 page)

“Then call me what you will,” I said, resigned.

“I shall,” she chuckled precociously.  “You know, you never thanked me for saving your life in the battle at the keep.”

“My life?” I asked.  I remembered how I had slowly drained the life from Aoife’s attacker with my forearm pressing into his throat.  “I saved yours.”

Killian continued his calling out.  “My Welsh cousins, carry on!  We go to invade and harry the English.  We give them blood, for blood begets blood.  They’ve drained yours.  It is your day to drain theirs.”

Godfrey shouted in response.  “That’s quite enough, priest.”  He sounded disgusted with Killian.  I laughed when I thought of the bickering pair.  “You’ll ruin whatever advantage the fog
cover has given us.”

Killian, in typical fashion, would not back down so easily.  “And King Godfrey, is it better to sneak into shore and find out that yours is the only longboat in an area surrounded by prickling spears?
  Or, would you rather come to Watchet with your entire armada intact?”

Godfrey swore to the norns for putting the priest in his path.  Then he answered, defeated, “Carry on, priest.”

He did.

Aoife slapped my mailed chest with the back of her hand.  “So you are under the mistaken impression that because you killed the man with your hands that you sa
ved my life?”  She didn’t pause for my answer.  It was just as well.  “Yet you forget that you wouldn’t be sitting here today had I not rammed your saex into his groin.  He would have chopped you in half.  Pierce and twist, that’s what I did.”

I wasn’t going to argue with the sure-minded creature.  With an overdramatized bow of my head, I said, “Young Aoife, I thank you for your gallantry.  Without you I would be dead.”

“I know,” Aoife answered plainly.  She scratched at a louse in her hair.  “Do you think that man would have died even without your strangling?”

“In time.  He would have bled to death.
  You cut a man in the groin and there’s almost no stopping the flow.”

“So, I’ll count him as my first kill.  I told Godfrey
, and then you, that I intended to kill a man, or two.”

“Docks!”
Killian screamed from port.

I rolled to my feet and was promptly sent back to the deck when
Charging Boar
hammered into a firmly placed dock piling.  We didn’t strike it head on, but careened starboard, the port side bouncing along the post.  The first three rowers on the port side received a swift smack of the oar handle into their noses as the blades snapped to the unflinching will of the stationary dock pillar.

“Ropes!” called Leif.  “Get us moored here!”

I knocked down a Welsh rower as I seized the coiled rope aft.  After forming a kind of large lasso, I tossed it to the post that would otherwise quickly fade into the distance.  I allowed the cord to snake overboard as I tied it off to a cleat.  At once the excess length was used up.  It snapped taut as fast as a feral dog’s nip, sending many of us to the deck planking again.

“Pull us in!” Leif yelled.  He held a
separate rope and was throwing a loop toward another post that had come into view through the morning mist.  Godfrey was relaying similar orders.  The calls from
Raven’s Cross
sounded nearby, but I could see neither them nor the other boats.

Shouts from ahead echoed as well.  Later, Killian told me it was English, a bastardized tongue formed from the words of Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Britons, Danes, and Celts.  When he told me this, I remember thinking that I would do my part to add some trusty Norse words to their thieving language.  That morning though, I understood little of it.  I could only tell that the calls that raced over the waters carried a fair amount of agitation
.  Our noisy entrance into England did not go unnoticed.  The alarm had sounded.

The rowers, even those with misshapen noses, fished their oars out through the oar holes and stowed them on the T-shaped racks while Leif and I hauled us ever closer to the dock.
  Behind me, I heard the familiar rap of shields being hauled up to the arms of their owners.  I heard spears and swords clattering as men pushed for position on the rocking longboat.  Aoife wedged next to me and without asking what to do recoiled the excess rope that was accumulating at my feet.  She was a smart beast.

As soon as the port side strakes were an ell away from the dock, men began leaping over
Charging Boar
’s gunwale.  They landed with thuds and without orders began forming a shield wall, inching their way further onto the dock and the unknown dangers that lurked ahead toward land.  The hull crunched into the pier.  Leif and I retied her off to the cleats.  Aoife jumped over and then Leif and then me.

Leif and I pressed through our men to assess the situation.  I snatched a Welshman by his hair and tugged him so that his shield was held more tightly to the next man’s in the shield wall.  We had clearly made it to England, hence the English.  We had obviously made it to a town, hence the docks.  What was less clear was whether or not we had even landed at Watchet.

To my left, I could just make out Godfrey’s ship.  They were now moored to a separate rickety dock that jutted out parallel to ours.  To my right, past
Charging Boar
, I could see nothing but dark water and more fog.  Ahead I could see the dock on which we stood disappear into the mist.  The general, dark, looming form of a hillside or town lay beyond.

“Are we all here?” shouted Godfrey.

“
Charging Boar
is here!” answered Leif.  “Where is here?”

Godfrey ignored the question.  Brandr’s voice rang out from the other side of Godfrey.  “
Dancing Stag
is here!” 
Dancing Stag
was the makeshift name Brandr had given one of our newly stolen boats.

“
Snake’s Revenge
is here!” called Loki, who had transferred to that boat to be her captain.

Several moments went by.  “By Hel, where is Randulfr
and his crew?”

“We’ve no time to find out,” Killian shouted.  “We’re here, wherever that is.  We must move quickly and use what surprise we have left.”

“Move up the docks to the shingle.  We assemble there and sweep in,” Godfrey called.

We jogged forward, holding our shields high to prevent a lucky archer from making an improbable kill
from out of the mist.  Our feet thundered across the docks until we rattled out onto a rock strewn beach.  As soon as our small shield wall met that of Godfrey, I leaned down to Aoife who had remained at my heel.  “Find that other ship and lead Randulfr back to us.”

The girl was a fine addition to our raid.  Of course, I didn’t think so at the start.  Of course, I protested her presence.  But after I gave her my order
that morning on the shingle in England, without the least bit of questioning or wavering, the dirty Irish girl grabbed my nose and cranked it.  “I’ll bring those men, but don’t go killing all the Englishmen before I get my shot.”  Aoife finished by shoving my nose back into my face and tearing off down the shore.

Godfrey had stepped in front of our assembled army.  He gave no speech
though I had wanted one.  Instead the King of the Isles did what was expected of a wicked Norse warrior.  He drew his lightweight war axe from his belt, hefted his shield, and turned his back to us.

“Let us take what we will.”  He spoke in an almost hushed tone.  It was quiet, but grave, determined.  Without waiting for any answer, Godfrey stepped forward and disappeared into the fog.
  The army behind him exchanged glances and then followed their king into the mist and into the growing din of the unknown.

. . .

We moved forward slowly, our leather boots slipping over the smooth, rounded stones and crunching the remains of the dead shellfish that littered the shingle.  It took longer than I had expected to cross the shoreline, for it was deep when measured from the docks to wherever the town began.

And there was most certainly a town.  It was most certainly a garrisoned town because in the fog I heard a growing number of shouts from who
mever we would oppose.  They were not the terrified screams of simple villagers, though those could be heard farther on.  No, these were the disciplined calls of men with military experience.  They were quick clips, shouts, and growls.  And, unlike most raids on civilian targets in which I have since participated, these voices drew closer, rather than farther.  They grew louder rather than softer.

Then the noise became like a roiling nest of serpents.

A spear smashed into the face of a fellow Greenlander.  His blood spattered my neck before his body toppled backward.  A host of grunts from the fog brought dozens more spears.  Most were not well aimed, but still, Welshmen, Norsemen, Manx, and Greenlanders all fell with missiles jutting from legs, arms, or worse.

Godfrey continued march
ing forward and so the rest of us moved on behind him.

I will
now share with you a secret.  I was more than a little frightened of what we would see in the heretofore unseen enemy.  Though I had fear, I was experienced enough to show none while in the shield wall.  I was intelligent enough to mention nothing about it later.  What type of raider would I have been had I whined about my anxieties in the thick of battle or even in its aftermath?  I’ll answer that.  I would have been a festering wound on a useless limb, good for nothing but amputation, deserving nothing but scorn.

All at once I saw vague forms, blobs of dark masses, really.

We crashed into that mass like a slow moving wave tumbles over the rocks on the shore.  They stood firm with their shields raised.  They were the solid earth.  We flowed, or perhaps, melted, acting as the water.  Our momentum fled.  We were halted.

There were several moments when
no one swung a weapon, be it a spear or a sword or an axe.  We shoved one another, shield against shield.  My old piece of timber was pressed against an Englishman’s bark.  The man was a head shorter than me.  Everyone was shorter than me back then, though I think a shriveled woman aged fifty is probably larger than me today.  I know that I held my spear at bay.  My tarnished sword hung harmlessly at my waist, my father’s saex securely next to it.  What I did that morning in the fog was push.

I rammed my shield again and again into my opponent.  He repeated the favor, staring up angrily through wide green eyes.  The Englishman spat curses.  I didn’t know what he said, but they were curses, probably the same as the ones I hurled in his face.  “You filthy stinking shit!  I’ll wipe
you from this beach like I scrape a dog’s waste from my boot.”

It was as if the morning fog had made both sides tepid.  The English had been willing to launch projectiles into the mist, but once our faces were a nose’s distance from their own, they lost their will.  In fairness, we seemed to have experienced the same.  Godfrey pressed his shield aga
inst the shields of two men.  The king was not a man of great size, but his zeal more than made up for it.  Smaller yet was Killian.  The priest held a shield just like the rest of us.  He swore a string of curses in his native tongue for which I’m sure he would have to beg forgiveness from his One True God.  Turf Ear screamed.  He could probably only hear the loudest of the Englishmen’s jeering.  The Welshmen shouted and pushed.  It was an entirely impotent struggle.

The king was jostling with an Englishman
who was as stout as a bear.  Then Godfrey lost his footing on the slick, loose stones of the shingle.  His feet slid backward and he fell to his knees.  Godfrey used the edge of his great round shield to stop his progress before his chest slapped into the ground.  The big Englishman tipped forward onto the king and began fumbling with his spear in order to ram it into the Godfrey’s exposed back.

The time for nervous posturing h
ad ended.  It was like when the drums hummed at a celebration around the bonfire during Winternights.  As soon as the jarl strode to the speaking rock, the musicians all understood that it was time for their riotous noise to cease.  They would halt their pounding at once so that a solid two heartbeats of dead silence passed before the jarl’s powerful words rang true.

Both sides
of the contest on the shingle that morning halted all movement when the king and large enemy warrior toppled together.  For two lumbering heartbeats we turned our attention to the only spot that showed action.  The king and the Englishman grappled.  Even men at the end of the line, far out of sight of the king, sensed a change and stayed their hands.  They stopped their thrusting as they peered toward the center.

The pressure against my shield ebbed.  My mind calculated a hundred possibilities of what to do, but truly only one viable idea came to mind.  I knew only that the shield wall and its cohesion were all important.  The shield wall, intact, meant life.  The shield wall, with a gap, meant certain death.  Ours had a gap in it that morning, a crack that could allow the flood waters of growling Englishmen to pour through and hack us from the rear.
  Our knees would buckle.  Our heads would be lost.

With quick ferociousness, I clutched the shaft of my spear, turned, and plunged the head into the
stout Englishman’s neck.  Blood ran down onto the king’s back.  The English warrior clawed and kicked at the stones for a moment before he became still, moaning.  I jerked the spear back out and was rewarded with a spray of the man’s crimson.  Still holding my spear, I slapped my hand on his back and lifted him off my king.  I threw his large body back to its place in their line.  Godfrey jumped to his feet, instantly ready.